L'Esprit de L'Escalier

In the fifth grade, Ms. Pedersen, who was overly snide and sarcastic for an elementary school teacher, handed back Astronomy quizzes and as she did, loudly announced people's grades. There was something gauche about this; we attended an international school, not a fascist institution run by the stasi, and most of our parents were diplomats and had taught us at an early age to make nice at all costs and not ever marginalize anyone or make them feel bad if we could help it. Ms. Pedersen seemed to know this, and sometimes it appeared that her aim in teaching at this school was to provoke, and to throw the weight of her aggression against what she probably perceived as our sissy effete ways. I disliked this woman quite strongly, but I didn't hate her, because at the time, I didn't really hate anyone. I should credit her for inspiring my first taste of rage, my first sense of deep injustice. She was tall and red-faced, with stringy brown, blonde streaked hair. She wore tight acid-washed jeans and white sweatshirts. She would make inappropriate and sometimes lewd jokes about sex and menstruation, which made us uncomfortable, because we didn't know much about either of these things. But she also made us feel uncool if we didn't laugh along with her. She was like a grown-up mean girl. I found something about her deeply distasteful. Maybe a handful of us did. The kind of distasteful that makes you wrinkle your nose at a person and also be a little afraid of them. If you had a choice, you would stay far away from them, but the thing about school is that you're forced to interact with all kinds of assholes, who in an ideal world would be quarantined at an asshole camp.

By contrast, my homeroom teacher, Ms. Cannon, was elegant and jovial and kind. She wore white peacoats and told stories about San Francisco in the 60s. There was something beautiful about her. It's important to resist the urge to get nostalgic or start projecting here. But her beauty had to do with her kindness, her openness. I loved Ms. Cannon. I still love her. Like in a deep place in my heart.

But Ms. Pedersen had a meanness to her. Looking back, she could have been in a shitty marriage, or unhappy about teaching fifth grade science, or maybe she had parents who were sick, or maybe she was just a straight-up mean bitch. But it seemed as though she looked to create a terrifying sense of volatility, and I felt it every time I walked into her classroom. So it wasn't entirely surprising that she would do something yucky and uncomfortable like reading people's grades aloud. When she got to the girl who had received a D, she decided to recite, for the benefit of the entire class, all of the girl's answers. I looked at my quiz. I had gotten an A-, but I almost wished I was the one who had gotten the D, because Ms. Pedersen seemed to relish these moments where she could make fifth graders feel even smaller than they were. I knew she would draw this out for as long as she could.

"Why do we have night and day?" recited Ms. Pedersen, giggling with a kind of scary and unpredictable meanness, "because people need to sleep. That's the answer written down here," she laughed and then turned to the rest of us, an audience. A couple of people laughed. This was horrifying. She looked directly at the girl wearing a turquoise jacket and purple sneakers and a blue headband. The girl looked at the desk in front of her. She was trying not to cry.

"What kind of answer is that?" she rolled her eyes at the girl. The girl looked back at her desk. She didn't even wipe away her tears. She didn't even sob out loud. She just sat quietly and said nothing. No one did. We were all shellshocked, entirely unprepared for this ugly pageant.

"Why can't people live on the moon? Because there's no electricity," she said in a little girl voice, turning to the crowds and encouraging more laughter.

And she went on and on and on. She read every single question and answer on that test before she threw the piece of paper in front of the girl with the bright blue headband, who by now was probably permanently damaged for life. It was over. It couldn't be undone. Now it was stuck in all of our minds, this terrible, scary violation.

And then we got on with the next unit like nothing had happened. Something about deciduous trees that I don't remember. What I do remember is that the girl with the blue headband continued to sit at her desk, continued to cry. I couldn't concentrate. I kept looking over at her, and then at Ms. Pedersen who was drawing trees on the chalkboard with a cool defiance, distancing herself from the remarkable unpleasantness that she had just created. I could feel the sense of injustice rising within me. I wanted to stab Claire Pedersen in the throat with my pencil. Repeatedly. I wanted to smash her head into the chalkboard. I wanted to scream. I wanted her to lose her job and end up penniless on the streets begging for change. I wanted to humiliate her in front of a room full of people, for doing what she had done, some sort of semi-permanent damage that she inflicted so carelessly, with a laughing ease and then seemed to forget about, just as quickly. I looked at the girl with the blue headband that her mother had probably picked out for her to wear that morning. If she had known what her day was going to turn out like, she probably wouldn't have come to school today.

When we left the classroom to go to recess, no one said anything. It was almost as if it hadn't happened. But it had, and we had all witnessed it. It was the 5th grade equivalent of watching someone get raped and not saying anything about it. I know that sounds like a lame exaggeration, I know. Worse things have happened, are happening, around the world, at this moment. Terrible terrible things, awful violations. And time allows you to turn people into the worst caricatures of themselves. I spend so much time in other people's shoes, analyzing the various dimensions of character, but in my mind, Ms. Pedersen is a one-dimensional demon and will probably, to some extent, always be. That's kind of what you get for being an asshole to fifth graders. Kids don't have the facility to give you the benefit of the doubt, to blame your wayward behavior on your sad childhood or oppressive life circumstances. But what about the adults those kids eventually become? Do they have the capacity to absolve you of your rotten behavior? Maybe. But that doesn't mean they should or will. I don't know about the girl in the blue headband, but to me, Claire Pedersen still represents abuse of authority. She provides the basis for every villainous character I write. She's the reason I yell at people who are mean to the homeless. She's probably (God, I cannot believe I'm admitting this) part of the reason I spent eight years protesting against the Bush administration. She is, to this day, the only grudge I can't let go of, even 21 years later. It's fucked up, right? I know. And yet that experience is so much a part of my personal fabric that I still think about it, I still react to it when I'm reacting to other injustices, I still write it when I write about imbalances of power. It can't be undone. But how strange, to think that your entire worldview can be shaped by one instance, by something you observed when you were 11 years old.